From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Positive stories about Indian Residential Schools must also be heard

The Frontier Centre for Public Policy is pleased to announce the release of a thought-provoking new report titled Positive Stories of Indian Residential Schools Must Also be Heard by Hymie Rubenstein and James C. McCrae. This report challenges the dominant narrative surrounding Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, advocating for a more balanced and comprehensive understanding of their historical legacy.

In Positive Stories of Indian Residential Schools Must Also be Heard, Rubenstein and McCrae critically examine the current portrayal of the residential school system, which is often overwhelmingly negative. The authors argue that this narrative fails to acknowledge the positive experiences of many former students and the genuine intentions of those who worked within the system. While not dismissing the testimonies of abuse, the report emphasizes that these accounts do not represent the full spectrum of experiences at the schools.

The report highlights several stories of individuals who credit their time in residential schools with shaping their successful futures. For instance, Len Marchand, Canada’s first status Indian member of parliament and a federal cabinet minister, attended the Kamloops (BC) Indian Residential School and spoke highly of the education he received there. In his memoir, Breaking Trail, he noted that his time at the school inspired his desire to help his people through education.

Similarly, Tomson Highway, a celebrated Canadian playwright and composer, described his years at Guy Hill Indian Residential School in Manitoba as “nine of the best years of my life.” His parents chose to send him to the school, believing it would provide better opportunities for their children. The skills Highway acquired, including classical piano, were instrumental in his later achievements.

Reverend Canon Stan Cuthand, an Indigenous Anglican priest who served as a chaplain at several residential schools, also offers a positive perspective. He recalled that the schools were not “terrible places” and praised the efforts of staff who worked to protect and nurture the children, even integrating Indigenous culture into the curriculum.

As students return to classrooms this fall, the topic of residential schools has taken a central role in many curricula across the country. However, there is concern that some teachers focus solely on the “horrors” of these institutions or even frame Canada as a genocidal state, leaving little room for a balanced discussion. This report urges educators to offer a more nuanced view that includes both the positive and negative aspects of the residential school system. Stories like those of Tomson Highway and Len Marchand demonstrate that not every experience was one of trauma, and some students went on to achieve remarkable success as a result of their education.

The report also touches on the experiences of Lea Meadows, whose mother, Elsie McLaren Meadows, had a positive experience at the Brandon (Manitoba) Indian Residential School. Inspired by her time there, Elsie became a teacher and later worked in similar schools. Meadows argues that it is unjust to label all who worked at these schools as abusers, recognizing that many were dedicated to the well-being and education of the children.

Moreover, the report cites instances where Indigenous communities themselves supported the continuation of residential schools. For example, in 1970, Alberta’s Saddle Lake First Nation residents successfully protested the closure of Blue Quills School, taking control of the institution themselves. Similarly, in 1971, eight Saskatchewan bands advocated for the Marieval Indian Residential School to remain open, emphasizing its importance for children from challenging home environments.

Positive Stories of Indian Residential Schools Must Also be Heard is a timely and significant contribution to the ongoing debate about the legacy of the residential school system. It encourages Canadians to consider all perspectives in the pursuit of truth and reconciliation, acknowledging both the positive and negative aspects of this complex history.

Download the backgrounder here. (10 pages)

About the Authors:

• Hymie Rubenstein is the editor of REAL Indigenous Report. A retired professor of anthropology, he served as a board member and taught for many years at St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, the only Roman Catholic higher education institution in Manitoba.
• James C. McCrae is a former attorney general of Manitoba and Canadian citizenship judge.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Terry Etam

Consumers have spoken, auto makers are responding, and the odd man out are governments still paralyzed in 2019 when euphoric and nonsensical “environmental” policy danced on the supposed grave of last century’s fuel.

Summer was pretty quiet, thankfully, but time for a jolt to get reengaged. There’s no better way than getting yelled at, so today let’s talk about a surefire recipe – Electric Vehicles. Those that love EVs really love ‘em, and to speak ill of them in front of the fans is akin to asking questions about the size of their children’s ears.

EVs have an outsized role in the current cultural and economic landscape, in an odd way. They are seen as the best hope to turn the tide of general consumer emissions. Governments threw their full weight behind them to an astonishing degree, legislating them into projected dominance at an unprecedented (and as it turns out, insane) pace.

What makes EVs such a flashpoint is that they intersect with a bunch of stuff that people hold dear. For some, EV ownership feels like a major personal contribution to the global emissions problem, if owning one entails a significant personal commitment. For many, EVs make total sense if only running around town, or if wealthy enough to keep one in the garage amongst the Astons and Ferraris so as to be well-positioned to make an environmental statement if required. Some love them for their simplicity, with few moving parts and lower maintenance requirements (lower, but not zero). Still others love them because they can fuel up at home, at night. And then there is the cohort that feels their rage against oil companies sated cathartically every time they drive past a gas station, those that believe hydrocarbons bring nothing but death, irrespective of the fact that to that point in their life they’ve brought them everything within their purview, including all the things that keep them alive. Have pity on those people, the neutron-level boxing matches going on between their ears are not to be wished on anyone.

On the flip side of the equation, and what brings it to the news, is the public’s general feeling of “meh” towards them, the 80 percent that constitutes the non-extreme middle. In sane times, that is not a problem; major change happens gradually for such big ticket items, and most get a sense that certain segments of the economy work extremely well as EVs – delivery fleet vehicles, forklifts, urban taxis, etc. Many would drift toward EVs as battery technology improves, as range increases, as price falls. But such a shift would be a multi-generational thing, particularly with the infrastructure changes required.

Most consumers can see that that Total And Rapid EV Domination is not a particularly wise vision, even if governments have declared that that must happen within their dog’s lifespan.

Consumers do know a good idea when they see one, and we can see that by the explosion in popularity of hybrid vehicles – those with internal combustion engines augmented by modest battery packs and electric motors that give a certain emissions-free range before switching to gasoline power.

There’s a reason for this growing popularity – it makes sense on many levels. A hybrid removes some of the major reasons people are reluctant to go full-battery EV (BEV) – range anxiety, cold weather performance, etc. – and, as Toyota has wisely pointed out, hybrids are actually better for the environment in general than mass consumer adoption of EVs.

How can that be, you might wonder. Here is Toyota’s calculation, in what they call the 1:6:90 rule. An excellent write up can be found here, and the gist of it is: Because of immense challenges in finding, developing, mining, and processing critical metals and minerals (hundreds of new mines required globally, with each new mine having weaker grades than before, and with many jurisdictions becoming more hostile towards new mines), it makes more sense to utilize a given BEV’s minerals requirements to construct 90 hybrids instead.

Because many trips are very short, a hybrid can run on electric power for most of them, which is how the spreading-out of these minerals to many vehicles makes emissions reduction sense. Toyota calculates that if the metals/minerals used to construct a single EV were instead used to  build 90 hybrids, the overall carbon reduction from those hybrids over their lifetimes would be 37 times that of a single EV (and with that sentence, I don my helmet for the incoming shouts of “Fossil Fuel Shill” – the aforementioned yelling).

Customers are clamouring to acquire hybrids. According to a Car Dealership Guy article (excellent auto news site, from a dealer perspective), in August, 48 percent of Toyota sales were hybrids, Hyundai had an 81 percent increase in hybrids (albeit from a relatively smaller number than Toyota), and Ford saw hybrid sales increase by 50 percent.

Volvo, a company that had pledged to be completely EV by 2030 and thereby banishing the smell of gasoline forevermore from customers’ nostrils, recently backed down from that pledge to announced hybrids would remain part of the equation indefinitely. “Everybody made a lot of assumptions two, three, four, five years ago, and that’s changed,” said Volvo’s CEO.

And then there is the Chinese onslaught of affordable, high-quality EVs that somehow policy planners didn’t see coming. Western countries announced bans on ICE in favour of full-EV by the next decade, and lo and behold, China controls most elements of an EV’s composition, and they took full advantage of that supply chain dominance (plus massive government support) to undercut virtually every western EV maker. Hey, you can’t do that, said US, Canadian, and EU governments, slapping huge tariffs on Chinese made EVs because well, we want to save the environment but not that badly (ultra cheap EVs are one of the few catalysts that would accelerate wide spread and rapid EV adoption among the masses).

Not sure where this goes next. Consumers have spoken, auto makers are responding, and the odd man out are governments still paralyzed in 2019 when euphoric and nonsensical “environmental” policy danced on the supposed grave of last century’s fuel. How they backpedal out of this is anyone’s guess, although there are signs, such as this headline: “Italy leads revolt against Europe’s electrical vehicle transition”. If memory serves from Italian traffic, they seem fine with virtually any sort of vehicular madness, so a automotive revolt in that land is a pretty big deal.

As with so, so many aspects of an energy transition, if the whole process had not been hijacked by zealots, we would be farther down the road, we would have consumers on side, we would have entire industries functioning properly instead of the fiascos we in for example the auto industry, and we most likely would have far less emissions.

Greenpeace USA on the ropes

In the big scheme of things, seeing something that has the words “green” and “peace” in the name fail would be disheartening; no sane person is against either the environment or peace. But put those two words together and you have something else entirely.

In the US, Greenpeace is for once holding the crappy end of the stick that they are used to jabbing at everything they disagree with. US energy pipeline giant Energy Transfer is seeking $300 million in damages for Greenpeace’s role in delaying the Dakota Access Pipeline. An ET victory would and should send shockwaves through the massively well financed protest industry that so far employs every tactic in the book to achieve victory (and by ‘victory’ we generally means ‘obstruction’ or ‘vengeance’ as opposed to any sort of constructive advancement). The big ENGOs spend hundreds of millions on staff and lawyers who literally have nothing to do other than bend society to their will without the bothersome hassle of going through the democratic process. Robert Bryce’s excellent Substack column keeps track of the staggering sums that US ENGOs churn through; Greenpeace US is a pipsqueak ($33 million annual engorgement) compared to locust-lawyer Natural Resources Defense Council’s staggering $548 million. With all that money, these groups construct nothing.)

It is a surprise there haven’t been more of these lawsuits filed by thwarted companies and hydrocarbon producers dragged into court for the sin of providing the fuel that keeps us all alive. It’s really not a hard argument to make; the world as we know it will collapse without hydrocarbon production, so shouldn’t thwarting that production on sometimes very flimsy grounds count for something? Shouldn’t blocking fuel from consumers that desperately need it (countless pipeline battles) count for something?

Greenpeace’s defence is pretty funny; suddenly they are insignificant, claiming to have had only a supporting role in the protests, and that the lawsuit is, the funniest part, an “attack on free speech.” Chaining one’s self (or worse, sending some naive acolyte to chain their selves) to a bulldozer on a construction site is, apparently, ‘free speech’, as is law fare and endless slanderous comments about the people and businesses that bring them the fuel that keeps their unhappy lives going.

Maybe the resurrected body, of which you can be certain will appear if this one is bankrupted, should start off with a bit of soul searching. Maybe peace means everyone working together for a common goal, not dramatizing a villain as the means of motivating the troops. Maybe ‘green’ should mean concern for habitat, concern for air pollution, concern for more intelligent use of resources, concern for the most logical global approach to progress, as opposed to a singular war against the bedrock of our society that it is glaringly obvious we cannot and will not live without.

First published here.

Terry Etam is a columnist with the BOE Report, a leading energy industry newsletter based in Calgary.  He is the author of The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity.  You can watch his Policy on the Frontier session from May 5, 2022 here.